Masters of Eden Read online

  Penal stations were different. Penal stations were small, uncomfortable, and unrelentingly remote, positioned as they were near the colonies no self-respecting traveler would want to go to.

  He didn’t walk her to her cabin, he picked her up by the belt and carried her slung over his broad shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The halls were narrow, wide enough just for one person to pass down. Or two, if one was atop the other.

  He reached a wall panel, slapped it with his palm, and Eden watched as the wall slid away to reveal a small cell about six feet by nine feet. There was a simple bed with a foam mattress and nothing else, gray plate walls seamlessly rounded so there were no panels to pry off, nothing to get a grip on at all. The commode was in a little dome at the end of the bed. Aside from that, there was nothing.

  “Had more room in the pod,” Eden said as the guard flipped her over his shoulder and deposited her gently on her feet inside the cell. She stood with her back to him, calmly letting him take the cuffs off. Her bottom was still hot and uncomfortable. The second he was gone she was going to rip the damned suit off.

  “Behave yourself and you’ll earn some time in the Holobay.”

  That was something hardly worth looking forward to. Holobays weren’t all they were cracked up to be. They were basically an omnidirectional treadmill and a pair of virtual reality goggles that allowed you to pretend you were doing something other than floating in the depths of space, waiting for a planet to rotate through its orbit so you could slingshot yourself at it and not miss.

  “I’ve never been one for playing pretend,” she shrugged, stepping deeper into the cell when he prompted her to do so.

  “Then you have a long stretch ahead of you.”

  Eden shrugged again. She had the rest of her life ahead of her, however long that was. The sentence was life, and everybody was serving it.

  The guard hit the panel again and the wall slid shut. She would have been in total darkness aside from a glowing lamp on the ceiling. Wasting no time, Eden peeled off her suit. She needed a shower badly, but being naked was a good start.

  Lying out on the mattress face down, she sighed to herself. After a month in a pod, stretching the limbs felt nice. The concoction they shot her up with had made sure they didn’t cramp or atrophy, but there was no substitute for being able to actually physically move.

  Her butt still ached from the paddling. Looking over her shoulder, she could see the tops of her cheeks had been toasted red. Not really all that much of a consequence for having shot thousands of volts into a guy. She’d half expected him to beat the hell out of her, not that Alliance personnel were allowed to indulge in that sort of violence. Still, millions of miles away from the nearest base, there wouldn’t have been anything stopping him.

  *

  “Little bitch,” Mixer swore under his breath. He’d come to a full ten minutes after being shocked. Half an hour later, he still wasn’t back to full operational status.

  Ghost smirked. “Three life sentences and you thought she wasn’t going to be a handful.”

  “My hands are all cramped up like an old lady’s,” Mixer complained, stretching his fingers out painfully. He’d caught a decent whack from the stunner, probably more than Ghost. “When these are working, I’m going to…” he trailed off into a growl.

  “I paddled her and put her in her cell,” Ghost assured him. “There’s not much else you can do, unless you want to spank her again. I doubt it would hurt. She strikes me as the sort of woman who has missed a few good spankings in her time.”

  “A few? All of them, I bet,” Mixer said, rubbing his hands along his thighs in an attempt to warm them up a little. The shock had constricted the vessels in his fingers, making them feel terribly cold even though the station was warm.

  “I have to hand it to her,” Ghost said. “Her plan was sound.”

  “You think it’s okay that she shot us?”

  “No,” Ghost said. “But… put it this way. What would you do if you were being shipped off to a colony to be someone’s breeding mate?”

  Mixer screwed up his face. “Nobody is breeding me.”

  “I mean if you were in her shoes, what would you do? Would you just sit in your little pod and let yourself be shipped off? Or would you do something about it?”

  “I’d do something about it,” Mixer said. “I’d never let them put me in a pod.”

  “See, that’s a flawed plan. Then you’re still stuck on a planet with a bunch of people who want to punish you. Her plan was to get shot up here, take over the emergency ship, and go wherever she wanted. Another two, maybe three minutes and she would have succeeded for sure. That’s some smart thinking there.”

  There was a snort and a curse from Mixer as he stretched his hands out and curled his fingers back down against his palm. “You’re not even mad she zapped us, are you?”

  Ghost shrugged. “There’s not much use in being mad; besides, that was our fault. We let ourselves get distracted. Prisoners will try to escape. It’s our job to see that they don’t.”

  “Fair point,” Mixer conceded. “You got her under control?”

  “Tucked up nice and safely in a cell.” Ghost pushed a button and brought up the feed from the cell.

  Mixer let out a low whistle as the screen flickered to life and focused on the very naked form of their prisoner. Her bottom was raised and bare, pink all the way across her not inconsiderable buttocks. She wasn’t short on curves, that was for sure.

  “I guess you taught her a thing or two,” he said. “That’s a hot little ass right there.”

  “Six of the best,” Ghost said. “A warning, but she will try again. We need to double security on the emergency craft. I’ve already changed the passwords and amplified encryption.”

  The prisoner stretched and turned onto her side, away from the camera. For a long moment, Ghost and Mixer stared at the lovely length of her body, admired the way her neat waist flared up to a bold, thick hip and strong thigh.

  “Well,” Ghost cleared his throat. “It doesn’t look as though she has the shakes.”

  “She’s got some kind of tremor,” Mixer said. “Look at the readout.”

  At the bottom of the screen were numbers indicating respiration and heart rate. For some reason, Eden’s pulse and respiration were both climbing, though she appeared to be doing nothing besides lying there.

  “I think…” Ghost squinted. “I think she’s…”

  Mixer let out a roar of laughter. “I guess she liked that paddling.”

  Their prisoner was masturbating. The movement of her shoulders and the parting of her thighs confirmed the diagnosis as she plunged her fingers deep into what they both imagined to be her hot, wet pussy.

  “So we get cramps and she gets an orgasm. Hardly seems fair. We should lock that pussy up,” Mixer said, grunting as his hands tensed up of their own accord.

  “We are not going to stop a healthy young lady from enjoying her body,” Ghost said firmly. “Sexual release is good for prisoner behavior.”

  “You think if she plays with herself long enough, she might decide not to attack us again?” Mixer hissed and stretched his hands again. “Blasted current hurts like a… why aren’t you in pain?”

  Ghost was in pain. His extremities were tingling and he ached all over. She must have set the charge to a level just slightly less than lethal. That was how he knew she had to be one of the good ones underneath it all. Calibrating a zapper wasn’t an exact science. If you wanted to be certain it was going to work, you’d max it out and to hell with the consequences. If their prisoner were truly dangerous, she’d be well on her way to the nearest rebel base and he and Mixer would be a couple of charred bodies.

  He flicked the screen off, gave her a little privacy. Mixer grunted, looking askance, but didn’t put up too much of a fight.

  Chapter Two

  Eden’s fingers were buried deep inside her pussy, plunging in and out with a desperation for release. It had been a month since she had physica
lly climaxed. Waking up from pod sleep had meant two things: one, being horny, two, being ravenously hungry. She could satisfy the first urge, so she did, helped along by the memory of strong hands wrapping themselves about her body. The guy was big. So big he made her feel small in comparison. She wasn’t used to feeling small. She was taller than most women, and than a good portion of men too. Statuesque, her mother used to call her.

  The climax was anti-climactic, as far as any orgasm could be. Though she felt some relief, it wasn’t the same when she did it to herself. Her fingers could never truly emulate the sensation a man’s fingers, lips, tongue, and cock could. It had been a long time since she’d had a mate; being a political renegade on the remains of a dying planet took a serious toll on one’s love life.

  That was behind her though. She’d seen Earth for the last time. Ejected from the cradle of humanity into space, where human colonies were fighting for survival over several galaxies. Some were more successful than others. Some colonies were already multi-generational. Not the colony she was bound for. That was barely ten years old, populated entirely by criminals, those who were disposable enough to be lost in the depths of the uncaring universe if that was to be their fate. No further thought would be given to her. Nobody would miss her. Nobody would speak her name. She had been erased from Earth. And she had missed her chance at an easy, early escape.

  Thoughts of despair accompanied her descent into a restless dozing state. The cell was not objectively comfortable, but it was much more comfortable than the pod had been. In comparison to that cylinder it was as wide as the Mojave, with as much scope for exploration. Months of travel staring at the interior of a pod had given Eden the ability to fixate on the smallest detail and remain entranced by it for hours. A form of meditation, she supposed, the mind’s defense against madness.

  An unexpected rousing knock at the door jolted her out of her dozing nap. For a second, she didn’t know what it was, then she remembered. She wasn’t alone anymore. There were other people in this place. She had rejoined a society of sorts, a society of two. Three, including her.

  “Uh, I can’t open that from in here,” she called out. “That’s kind of the point.”

  The panel slid open. She grabbed at her discarded suit and positioned it more or less over the pertinent parts of her body. The tall man with the galaxy blue eyes walked in and looked at her with professional detachment.

  “I’ve brought you some food and some clothes,” he said. He was holding a package of plain white scrubs and beige underwear. He was also carrying a plastic tray from which steam was rising. He put the clothes down at the foot of the bed and placed the tray on the little ledge next to her head.

  She sat up, still only half covered, but not really caring about her modesty. Modesty was a luxury that prisoners rarely had, especially political prisoners. Looking at the food, she found herself feeling more perplexed than hungry. It wasn’t food as she had known it. There were no discernible meats or vegetables; there was just a purple-tinged slurry.

  “What is that?”

  “It looks bad,” he admitted. “But it’s highly nutritious. Has all the proteins, vitamins, and minerals your body needs.”

  She gave the ‘food’ a tentative sniff. It didn’t smell like much. That was when he pointed out two little sachets on the side of the tray. They were both plain white, but one was stamped with the image of a brown cow, the other with a yellow chicken.

  “One of those is beef. One of them is chicken,” he explained in case she didn’t understand the ramifications of the labeling system. “Sprinkle the contents on and it will taste like something.”

  Eden picked up the plastic spork, dug the edge into the purple goo, and brought a small amount to her lips. It didn’t taste like much of anything, it was more reminiscent of glue than anything else, sticky and tacky and with a faintly bitter edge.

  “You’re going to want to use the flavors,” he said, smirking attractively. “They’re not technically for prisoner use, but I figure nobody should have to suffer through those rations for three months.”

  “Thanks,” she said warily. She really wasn’t sure why he was being nice to her. Maybe it was because she was naked. But he’d planned to bring the sachets before seeing her naked, so that couldn’t be it. Maybe he was just a nice guy. Yeah, that was likely, a nice guy who worked for the Alliance and had no problem shuttling women off to far-flung corners of the universe to be used as breeding stock for the colonies.

  Eden was all too well aware of what her fate was going to be. Plenty of men volunteered for deep space missions, not so many women. And those who did weren’t the kind who wanted to spend their days barefoot and pregnant in hostile alien lands. That was why the Alliance decided that law-breaking women would make the best ‘wives’ for the colonies.

  “I’ll let you eat and get dressed,” he said.

  “Hey,” Eden interjected before he could get out the door. “What’s your name?”

  He turned and looked at her, his expression the right side of kindly. “You can call me Ghost.”

  “Thanks, Ghost,” she said, doing her best not to roll her eyes. Of course he didn’t have a name. Couldn’t be a Mark or a Darren up there in the space prison. Had to be a Ghost. “Is there any chance of catching a shower?”

  He pointed to the capsule at the very end of her cell, a tiny little space just barely big enough to stand in. “Get under there and you’ll be cleaned up in a minute or two.”

  The door closed behind him. Eden made directly for the shower. There weren’t any dials or faucets that she could see, just a pad with two buttons, one green, one red. Simple enough. She pressed the green button and stood still as two ends of a clear plastic tube rose from the floor and descended from the ceiling. They joined together in the middle and then slowly the tube began to fill with ionized steam.

  Fighting back the natural panic that arose with finding oneself in a small steam turbine, Eden lifted her arms and reached between her thighs and did her best to make sure that the warm not-quite-spray reached every area of her body.

  The ‘shower’ worked in cycles. First hot steam would rise from the floor, then cooler air would rush from above ‘rinsing’ her off. She understood the mechanics at work; there wasn’t exactly a lot of water out there in space. Stations collected ambient vapor created when occupants breathed, when they urinated, and more to replenish their water supplies. The ‘shower’ was accompanied by a dusting of disinfecting powder, which fell from little grates in the ceiling after the first minute of the cycle. She scrubbed it against her body, then let it melt away with consequent rushes of heated and cooled air. Eden felt more like a dish in a dishwasher than a person cleaning herself, but when she stepped out she discovered that not only was she completely dry, but she felt incredibly clean too. There were no traces of dampness in the cell either; every little bit of vapor had been collected to be used on the next cycle.

  Clean, she dressed in the clothes Ghost had brought. The underwear actually fit, which was something of a surprise, especially considering how ample her breasts were. The pants and shirt were of a looser fit, but were also quite comfortable. The fabric was soft and it breathed nicely, a pleasant change from the rubber tire they’d shoved her into for the journey.

  There was just one problem—the clothes she now wore were in no way suitable for escape. But that didn’t matter as she was going to have to find another way out of her situation anyway. She doubted they would let her try the same trick twice.

  Sitting on the bed, Eden curled her feet under her body and picked up her food. Chicken or beef? The first real decision she’d had to make in months. She went with the beef, sprinkling the brown contents of the sachet over the goop. When she next brought it to her mouth, it tasted salty. Not like beef really, more like beef might taste like if you freeze-dried it, thawed it, washed it, freeze-dried it again and stored it in some old socks for a year. She ate a few mouthfuls of the goop, but had to give up. She was hungry, but not
that hungry.

  Having set the meal aside, Eden took a stroll about her new world. Pacing back and forth was actually quite enjoyable. She hadn’t moved her limbs freely in months. Swinging her arms back and forth, Eden relished the feeling of her muscles doing real work. They had held up surprisingly well in transit, thanks to the cocktail she’d been injected with prior to departure. She probably wasn’t up to running a marathon, but a short sprint wasn’t entirely out of the question.

  Dropping back onto the bed, Eden smiled up at the ceiling. Maybe it was movement, maybe it was the effects of the food, maybe it was simply the short conversation with her charming captor. Whatever it was, it was making her feel much better about things.

  Not long after her meal, Eden received a second visitor. There was a brief knock at the door that roused her from her relaxed state and set her heart pumping. Months in space with only the sound of her own heartbeat in the way of sound had made her hypersensitive to noise, especially the sudden kind.

  The door slid open to reveal a man standing in the hall. It was not Ghost. It was the anti-ghost. Shorter, but still taller than she, broad across the shoulders and with dark eyes that spoke to a potentially rough disposition. He wore the black Alliance uniform, which made him look like a living, breathing muscular wall. He turned sideways to get through the relatively narrow portal that hadn’t looked narrow at all until he arrived on the scene.

  “Who are you?” It was only after she asked the question that she recognized him. He was the other one she’d shocked on her way out of the pod. He looked different upright and with control over his limbs.

  “Name’s Mixer.” He looked at her with a dour yet annoyed expression. “You got any weapons I need to worry about?”

  “Just my native charm.” Eden tried for a smile. He glanced up to the right-hand corner of the room and shook his head. She thought that was odd. It was almost as if he were…